occasional ponderings from the Beadery

When a good idea isn’t

Anyone who has worked with beads has probably experienced a dreaded “Ooops!” moment of dropping a whole lot of beads on the floor. It works best when (a) it’s not just a few beads but a whole tube, (b) the beads are teensy tiny (think: no bigger than a flea’s eyelash), and (c) you spill them onto a rug that you specifically bought because it “hides dirt well.” Unfortunately, this also means that it hides spilled beads even better than it hides dirt.

During one of my recent “Oops” experiences after I’d been crawling around on the floor for about 15 minutes, it occurred to me that perhaps this was God’s way of trying to teach me patience. Or humility. Or some other noble spiritual goal.

Now I think God was just trying to teach me to be more careful in handling my beads.

Quite by accident, however, I discovered a great tool for picking up beads from the floor, a tool that eliminated all that crawling and plucking. This marvel of a tool is (drum roll! strobe lights!) an ordinary lint roller.

Unfortunately, as in so much of life, its virtue was also its vice. It was great at picking up beads, but it was clingy. It became too attached to them. In the end, it was more work getting them off the adhesive paper than it had been picking them off the floor.

One of those times when a good idea wasn’t. Which reminded me of a quote from Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson:

“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”